Communication Strategy for Government Communicators
About this course
A practical, self-paced course on building a communication strategy for a government organization: one short enough to use, specific enough to act on, and backed by evidence you can put in front of leadership.
Most government communicators are so busy reacting that strategy never gets a turn. The council member's request, the reporter's deadline, the rumor in the neighborhood group and the video leadership wants all arrive before lunch, and the plan becomes whatever lands first. That isn't a failure of skill. It's what happens to a function that produces things on demand for everyone else, and it leaves you unable to show what any of it achieved.
This course works through strategy the way the job is actually done. You'll start by auditing what already exists, including the accessibility and plain language checks that now carry legal deadlines for state and local governments. You'll map the people you need to reach, including the online group moderators and residents that most maps leave out. You'll look honestly at the narrative your organization already has and plan how to build a better one, find the stories in your organization's data without overstating them, and set up measurement that tracks what changed rather than how much you posted.
Every lesson draws on real, sourced cases, from the Flint Water Advisory Task Force's findings on official communications to the FBI's 2021 crime data gap, and each one ends with something to do for your own organization. Drawing on The Frontline Communicator, it's written by a practitioner for practitioners, and it uses three working tools: a strategy worksheet, a communications audit workbook and a stakeholder mapping worksheet.
Who This Course Is For:
- Government communicators who have never had time to write a strategy and know they need one
- Communicators new to a role who need to understand what they've inherited before deciding what to change
- Communications leads who have been asked what their team actually achieves and want a better answer than follower counts
- One-person communications offices that need a plan simple enough to keep using
Read a sample from this course
The plan is whatever lands first
It's 8:40 on a Monday. A council member has emailed asking why the new parking rules weren't "put out on Facebook." A reporter wants a comment on a budget line by noon. Your chief or director has an idea for a video. The website still has a closure notice from three weeks ago, and someone in operations has just asked whether you can "do something" about a rumor spreading in a neighborhood group. By lunchtime you'll have touched all of it, and none of it will have been your choice.
That is what communications looks like in most government offices without a strategy. It isn't laziness, and it isn't a lack of skill. It's the default state of a function that produces things on demand for everyone else. Most communicators spend years improvising: reacting to whatever arrives, producing content because someone asked for it, responding to a crisis without a framework, and wondering why they always feel behind.
A communication strategy is what everything else you do should hinge on. It doesn't give you all the answers. It gives you a foundation to work from, a way to make decisions under pressure, and a record of what you intended, what you did and what it achieved. Put simply, it answers four questions:
- What are we going to say?
- Why are we saying it?
- Who are we saying it to?
- What do we hope will change as a result?
Those four questions, properly answered and written down, are the core of everything in this course. The later lessons deal with each of them in turn: who you're talking to (stakeholder mapping), what story you're telling over time (narrative), where you're starting from (the audit), how you make your evidence land (data and storytelling), and how you'll know it worked (measurement). This lesson is about the frame that holds them together, and about why it's worth doing when you already have more work than hours.
The honest answer is that the strategy is the only thing that lets you say no, or "not yet," to some of that Monday morning list without it sounding like a personal preference. When the council member's request doesn't serve an objective anyone has agreed on, you have something to point to. When it does, you can move it up the queue and explain why.
What you'll learn
Course Curriculum
Full access upon enrollment- 1.The plan is whatever lands first
- 2.What the document is, and what it isn't
- 3.Tactics are what you do, strategy is why
- 4.What it looks like when nobody has one: Flint
- 5.The core elements, and a framework that's been tested
- 6.This week: draft the one-page version
- 7.The strategy is how the organization remembers
- 8.Sources & further reading
Course Resources
Available after enrollment
Course details
- Self-paced
- Certificate of completion
- Lifetime access
- 6 lessons · 48 sections
- 3 downloadable resources